What is a Mind Map®? A Mind Map® is a powerful graphic technique which provides a universal key to unlock the potential of the brain. It harnesses the full range of cortical skills - word, image, number, logic, rhythm, colour and spatial awareness - in a single, uniquely powerful manner. In so doing, it gives you the freedom to roam the infinite expanses of [...]

Similar to a road map, a Mind Map® will:
• Give you an overview of a large subject/area
• Enable you to plan routes/make choices and let you know where you are going and where you have been
• Gather and hold large amounts of data
• Encourage problem solving by seeing new creative pathways
• Enable you to be extremely efficient
• Be enjoyable to look at, read, muse over and remember
• Attract and hold the eye/brain

Tony Buzan, inventor of the now world-famous Mind Map, has achieved an astonishing series of accomplishments. The world's top lecturer on the brain and learning. Tony Buzan has lectured to audiences ranging from five-year-old children through disadvantaged students to first-class Oxbridge graduates, to the world's top business directors,[...]

• When YOU want to find innovative ideas and creative solutions.
• When YOU want to remember the information effectively and efficiently.
• This means that although there is the pressure YOU, YOU can still remember it with good information.
• When YOU want to set a goal, and the steps to achieve them.
• When YOU are thinking to change YOUR career or [...]

How can you mind map? Below is a step by step process on how you can create a mindmap. The example used is preparing an event (i.e. school ball), but you could mindmap anything else (e.g. subjects).

Step 1: Grab some coloured pens/pencils, a blank piece of paper and turn it sideways. In the centre of the page draw the first image that comes to mind on the topic you are mindmapping. Label the image.

Step 2: Branch off from your central image and create one of your main ideas (think of each branch as being like a chapter in a book). Label the branch. You can also draw a picture for it.

Step 3: From your main branches draw some sub-branches and from those sub-branches you can draw even more branches. What you are beginning to do is create associations between ideas.

Step 4: Draw pictures for each branch or for as many branches as possible. Make each picture as absurd, funny and/or exaggerated as possible. The reason for this is that we think in pictures and remember vivid, exaggerated images more easily.

Step 5: Draw another main branch but this time use a different colour. Colour helps to seperate out different ideas and keeps your mind stimulated). Draw sub-branches and pictures. If you get bored at any stage, move on and create another branch.

Stage 6: Keep repeating the above process (different colours, main branch, sub-branches and absurd pictures). Make sure each branch is curved and not a straight line. The brain is more stimulated by curved lines.

Step 7: Voila! You have created a mind map. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a work of art. Allow yourself to be as messy and creative as you like. It doesn’t matter if other people can’t understand your mind map. You just need to be able to.